The Umpleby's Net

A 2nd Edition Umpleby.

Among the curious, little-used, and often-derided B-list of the AD&D Fiend Folio, there is a monster called the Umpleby that is tall, hairy, friendly up to a point, and can put a real hurting on you with ... static electricity from its shaggy pelt. It appeared in somewhat rough form in the source material, White Dwarf magazine's Fiend Factory (exhibit A below) and got a clearer set of rules and rulings in the Fiend Folio itself, including more detail given to its hair net weapon (exhibit B).

No relation.

The Umpleby is one of the lesser known Fiend Folio contributions that poses a weird, specific challenge, like the Aleax, Meenlocks, and so forth. It has a little bit of the mess-with-you factor from grudge monsters like the Zorbo or Disenchanter. In the editions since then, it has sometimes gotten dragged out of the attic for sheer obscurity cachet, like the Flumph but more underground. A long time ago here, I dragged it out as an example of a bad monster.

And where on earth does that name come from? Is it just a coincidence that one Stuart Umpleby was the co-founder of an early communication network -- NET-work -- in the 1970's, that used an instructional computer system called PLATO? A network that eventually failed to join up with the Internet like like ARPANET did, and almost got canned by Nixon for hosting calls for his impeachment? Is it coincidence that PLATO's terminals glowed orange? If true, this has to be one of the most obscure current events references in all of D&D. If Stephen Wood's not around to comment, perhaps a mystery forevermore.


Exhibit A:

Exhibit B:

The Trianthrope

Here's my own take on the tirapheg, and also a chance to show out my new unified old school system monster listing format. Comments on both monster and format are welcome. Some explanations of the format, below the monster:

Trianthrope

Hit Dice: 2 or more
Size: M
Move: 6
Armor Class: 9 (descending)/10 (ascending); Armor 0/Agility 0/Magic 0
Attacks: Arm bash 1d4 nonlethal; Arm bash 1d4 nonlethal; Hand (dagger) 1d4
Special abilities: Spells; 2 mind attacks (save vs. Mind/Spell or 1d6 damage to INT and WIS); saves at +4 vs. mind and illusion spells
Intelligence: Exceptional
Alignment: Neutral
Reaction: variable, from 3-8
Morale: 6
XP Basis: As Hit Dice, plus 3 major Specials

A trianthrope is the willing or unwilling result of an arcane alchemical ritual known as the Chymical Wedding, in which a living male and female body are fused together, creating a third sentience which controls its parents. The union of two bodies and their exploitation to create a third is monstrously evident in the creature's two featureless heads, handless arms, and footless legs. The third head is hairless but has a normal face, the third arm is possessed of long, supple inhuman fingers, and the third leg is wide-footed and contributes to an effective if slow means of ambulation aided by the other two stumps.

The creature communicates by direct telepathy, with no need to know the language of the being it communicates with. It may have more hit dice than two if people with class levels were used to create it. The head with a face can silently use illusion and mind-affecting spells as a magic-user with level equal to its hit dice plus one. The faceless heads each can make one mental attack per round with a range of 60 feet; the victim must save or take 1d6 temporary damage rolled separately to intelligence and wisdom, being unable to think if one ability goes below 3 and knocked out completely if at or below 0. Lost abilities are regained at 1 point per 10 minutes.

Nothing definite can be said about the disposition of this creature. Some are driven quite insane and hostile by their ordeal; others master themselves and become terrifying, if physically fragile, controllers of bodyguard creatures. A few are curious and potentially friendly to intruders.

Monster format explanations:

• The Armor breakdown is a way to let GMs know how many points to subtract if physical armor is being ignored (as when a mere touch needs to be scored) or if agility is being ignored (as when attacked by surprise or from the back).
• Nonlethal damage knocks out its victim if reduced to zero or lower hit points, and is regained at 1 point per minute.
• Intelligence is classified as in AD&D, with the understanding that this is not mere book-learning ability as in some interpretations of the character ability, but how strategic and clever the beast is.
• Reaction is rolled on two d6; in effect, it can also be expressed as a modifier by subtracting 7 from it. A roll equal to the reaction score or one below it indicates a neutral attitude, with various degrees of hostility according to the margin it failed or succeeded by.
• Morale is also rolled on two d6, as in the Basic game. At some point in the future I'll explain further the various interactions of Reaction and Morale rolls...
• XP basis: Old-school games vary enormously in XP granted for monsters slain or dealt with. I myself prefer 100xp/HD (the perils of fighting are its own deterrent at lower levels, and this lets me be stingier with treasure there), but the norm across S&W/OSRIC/LL is a tighter award.  The best I think I can do is indicate how much special abilities should count. In my system each major special adds 50% of the original base hit dice and each minor one 25%. Thus a 2HD tirapheg should be treated as 5HD due to its effective 3 major special abilities.

Bad Monsters: The Urge to Improve

Close behind the temptation to laugh at bad monsters (ha, ha and ha) is the temptation to improve them. It's the same urge that led Neil Gaiman to write a "Prez: The Teen President" story in heroic rather than camp mode in Sandman, or Alan Moore to use Mr. Mxtyplxzwhatever as a very serious villain in one of his DC series. This upgrading from silly to serious is known in TV Tropes land as Cerebus Syndrome, after the Dave Sim comic series that evolved from a funny-animal spoof of Marvel's Conan series to something altogether more profound.

Soon to be released, if not already out, is a fine example in the D&D canon: Paizo's Misfit Monsters Redeemed. How successful have Messrs. McComb, McCreary, and Sutter been? Hard to judge from just the blurb. Some of their "misfits," like the dire corby and flail snail, I never thought were that bad to begin with. With others, like the disenchanter, I'm highly skeptical about their chances for redemption at all. And others show real inventiveness and promise, like the adherer rethought as a horrible spider-silk mutant, and the flumph as a Derlethian herald of the fight against the Great Old Ones.

For some monsters, as for film star Frances Ethel Gumm or pop star Stefani Germanotta, a change of name is going to be a necessary part of any serious rebranding. There's no room for a "flumph" in the Cthulhu Mythos, and I'm guessing most people hate the flail snail because of its silly rhyming name. This point was grasped by Max, of the currently inactive blog Malevolent and Benign, in his great series of Tirapheg Week posts. Five differently named variants on the classic half-baked, purposeless weirdo monster from the Fiend Folio - living statue, alien wizard, mutant mishap, limb-collecting pirate, and three-headed lounge singer - for five different game systems, all brilliantly executed.

What drives people to upgrade the classic old stinkers of monsterland? The urge is greatest, it seems, for the "failure to converge" monsters. These collections of haphazard bits, pieces and abilities form a kind of Rorschach test, an irresistible challenge to create meaning out of meaninglessness. I'm sure there are other improvements out there that I haven't come across, and it would be interesting to know of them.

Next: my own tirapheg variation.

Bad Monsters: Failure to Diverge

Allow me to resurrect this article on creativity that came to my attention via Trollsmyth several months ago.

I'm passingly familiar with the psych literature on creativity, but the short review in the article reminded me that creativity is not just about making up crazy stuff (divergent skills), but also vetting the crazy ideas to make sure they serve your purpose (convergent skills). The convergent skills in particular are what makes the difference between "Yeah, she's very 'creative' (eyeroll)" and "Wow, she's really creative!"

Now that we're ready to move from the good side of the Fiend Folio to the bad, this theory can help explain bad monsters - in AD&D or anywhere else. Monsters can either fail to diverge, or converge. Converging is the more spectacular kind of failure, so let's cover failure to diverge first, AKA basic lack of creativity.

The prime example of this is where you take an existing monster, jack it up by a hit die or two, and pretty much call it a day. I'm not saying the Fiend Folio didn't have its flinds and what not, and even the Monster Manual needlessly promoted the otyugh to the, er, neo-otyugh. But the real champion of the phoned-in monster upgrade was Monster Manual II - greater basilisk, greater lammasu, annis, xaren, margoyle, storoper, thessalhydra, different colored slimes, jellies, puddings and oozes for Pete's sake ...

Mmm. White pudding.

Then you have the even more wrongheaded monster downgrade - the moral equivalent of letting your players feel important in the Star Wars universe by having them meet Dark Helmet. Thus, you have FF's mini-red dragon, the firedrake. And then MM2 goes hog-wild with a mini-beholder, mini-stone golem, and hey, if you want to say you bagged an elephant too, we'll give you one the size of a Jack Russell terrier.

Let's not forget the gratuitous monster breeding program, the kind that dares to envision the offspring of two critters already in the same niche - kind of like those towns where a Norwegian dating a German is considered "interracial." Thus, the FF's ogrillon, giant troll, two-headed troll (oh, they forgot the ogg-roll, which is what you get when you cross an ogre and a troll, right) ... yeah, and the gorilla bear.

Look, either you need a gorilla, or you need a bear. You are never going to need a gorilla bear.

What's sad about all these monsters is that they show so little faith in you, the DM, and your ability to add, subtract, or average basic numbers. If you want a super-tough ... let's call it a russet ... hulk, you should really be able to gin it up on the fly, adding some hit dice here, subtracting some AC there. AD&D is simple enough that you don't have to worry about his Spot skill or Charisma.

Next: The convergently challenged ... source of the truly legendary WTF's.

Grimlocks vs. ... Every Other 2HD Soldier

Okay - one more damn good Fiend before we start fixing up the bad ones.

Grimlocks are, of course, the Fiend Folio's version of H. G. Wells' Morlocks from The Time Machine. They fill that "2 hit die troops" niche that your party starts bumping into once they have a level or two under their belts. Grimlocks are in direct competition with gnolls, troglodytes, lizard men, crabmen and so on.

And they win. Hands down the best 2nd level dungeon soldier.

The great advantage of grimlocks is they are not ani-men, human-imals, beast-oids, zoo-morphs or what have you. They are human ... and not human. Most plausibly descended and degenerated from us, they belong to a great old pulpy tradition of inbred cave-dwellers. Consider, for example, how much creepier Clark Ashton Smith's The Dweller in the Gulf would have been if it had been set on Earth not Mars, and with Earthlings and not Martians populating the strange society the explorers find.

Unlike gnolls and their kindred, unlike the weaker humanoids the party has been battling on the shallow levels, grimlocks are utterly of the underground, natives of its deep places. They may raid on the surface ... but they don't have to. Grimlocks are fundamentally different from the Tolkienoid grunts; imports from the world of science fiction, they nonetheless fit perfectly in a world of weird fantasy.

Completing the greatness of grimlocks is their blindness and Daredevil-sense. Different things work against them. No illusions; no casting light on the face; then again, if they surprise you, it's not because you've been holding lanterns and torches to light your way. Visual dangers of the dungeon - medusa's gaze, bedazzling mosaics, enchanting purple flames - hold no peril for them. But clouds of pepper, or the din of beaten shields? That just might work. One more way their traits and attributes hold together and create a memorable picture of underground horror.

So, one last time - sometimes the Fiend Folio is better.

Fiend Folio and the Horror Esthetic

As Halloween approaches, paging through the AD&D Fiend Folio in search of gems among the rubble for a series of posts rapidly approaching the point of diminishing returns, I find that some of the strongest entries distinguish themselves by evoking, not weird fiction or science fiction, but the horror genre.

The following Fiends in particular are noteworthy for being written up as little mini-dramas reminiscent of EC comics or Clive Barker stories:

"Don't worry.
 Russ can draw us scarier."

Meenlocks: You haven't felt the same since the party unsealed that foul-smelling tunnel. Now your companions snicker and tap their heads when you complain of whispering, shuffling in the shadows, and dreams that they are coming to get you. You wish that you were crazy ... but you're not ... they are coming ...

Penanggalan: Although at first you were suspicious of that druid you found in the woods, she soon proved her worth, helping you past the swamp and calming down the crocodiles in the river. Now she has gone back to her home for the night, and shameful, sinful dreams of her persecute you ... and when you wake, you feel weaker ... but vinegar ... why the smell of vinegar on your blanket?



Revenant: The purse the Thieves' Guild offered you to smuggle their wanted man out of the city was heavy enough for you to jump at the prospect. The law may have lost the scent ... but that stooped, awful-smelling hooded figure that dogs avoid is right behind you ... and you don't really want to know why the thief fainted to see the sword that it carries ...

Each of these "horror story monsters" (literally, in the case of meenlocks which seem to be adapted from this 1973 film) figures in a well-defined haunting that plays out over several days, quite unlike anything the original Monster Manual had to offer.

Ed Greenwood's famous criticism of the FF, offered in the pages of Dragon magazine, was that many of the monsters were incompletely developed. These three write-ups quite conspicuously avoid that flaw. If anything, they fall into the opposite one: the monsters are so scripted-out that they end up dominating and creating an adventure, rather than being worked into it. Compare this to the vampire: we are given a set of abilities and some hints at motives, but the exact strategy and behavior of the creature are left up to the DM. This leaves room for the vampire to be anything from a brooding Strahd to a feral Nosferatu to a cunning super-villain.

The scripted approach may be friendly to the inexperienced adventure runner, and was eventually the way D&D would go under the influence of Greenwood and others, with monster ecologies and tactical notes. But it also leaves little room for creativity, or for surprise if the players have read the monster book. To innovate, the DM has to write over already-written-in space, rather than project into blank space.

I will go further and say that Greenwood's criticism misses the mark. The bad monsters in AD&D are bad not because they are under-described, but because they are misconceived in the first place. If you need any proof, behold the abundance of uninspiring and ridiculous monsters even in the 2nd and 3rd edition epochs, where the norm got close to two full pages of stats, description and ecology. And in the Fiend Folio, no matter how much detail you give the flumph, how much we know about its gizzard and egg sacs, it's basically a little flying saucer alien out of place in a medieval fantasy world it never made.

Well, I guess the point of diminishing returns is here. There were some other worthy creatures in the Fiend Folio - the kuo-toa and drow (though here, also over-written; most of their surprising abilities and details should have been kept in the original modules, for the above stated reasons) - the iron cobra - the githyanki and githzerai - and a decent roster of b-list humanoids and critters for weird worlds without orcs and minotaurs.

And a whole sackful of clunkers. Can they be rehabilitated? We'll see, in the weeks to come.

The Necrophidius Takes On MM1 and MM2 ... No Contest!

How do you improve on skeletons? Those evergreen, Harryhausenish, all-weather, no-feeding-required, make-players-circle-every-pile-of-jumbled-bones-cautiously staples of the scary dungeon?

The Fiend Folio knows. You stick a human skull on a snake skeleton ... you give it a couple of snake-related magic powers (snake dance, paralytic bite) so the monster makes sense.

And oh yeah, you make it NOT UNDEAD. You're a bitter, wise and experienced monster designer who's had one too many bone-pile ambushes rebuffed by some low-level crucifix jockey.

"Unfair!" you might cry in defense of the Monster Manual. "The skeleton is merely the basic monster, of course it is going to be improved on as the game develops!"

So by that token the skeletal monster from the Monster Manual 2 should be all kinds of awesomeness rungs above the Necrophidius, right? Like - a skeletal unicorn-pegasus whose horn blasts Mandelbrot fractals that do 10d12, or something, right?

"I call it the Necropiggyus."

Here. Have a skeletal dog. Or perhaps a skeletal sheep, or chinchilla, or something. It's MM2's answer to the Necrophidius: the animal skeleton. Par for the course, from the book that statted up goats, squirrels, and the herd animals of the lower planes.

Sometimes the Fiend Folio is better ... both forwards and backwards.

The Retriever ... vs. Demons Type I-VI

I see the adventurers have stolen the ostrich-egg-sized navel ruby from that demon statue on the 9th level. They're trucking toward the stairs, whistling and skipping, chatting about building a little pied-a-terre in the Merchants' Quarter with the proceeds. When they look back, what have you got coming at them, to make them well and truly befoul their breeches?

• A Type I-IV demon, all looking like some Thundercats villain action figure?
• A Type V? Okay, she's badass, but she has a human head. You can talk to her. Maybe throw her back the gem, and a couple of henchmen to sweeten the deal, and hope she backs off easy.
• A Type VI? Too overexposed. The man from Oxford called and he wants his fallen angel demon back.

Here boy! Fetch!

No, you want something really out of the ordinary ... mindless, uncaring, mutated, terrifying, Lovecraftian. Arachnid. Four scything arms of death.  Four eye rays. Dragon-breath-level damage from three of them. The fourth can turn you into stone, or lead, or a nice golden consolation prize, or mud, from which you can only rise if a mud to stone and stone to flesh spell happen to be handy within 10 minutes.

So good luck with that.

Or if you like any of those other demons? You can have them too. "Demons sometimes mount howdahs on the back of a retriever and ride on the creature to the hunt."  

Need I say more ... sometimes the Fiend Folio is better.

Intellect Devourers AND Carrion Crawlers team up vs. Grell ... and Lose!

The poor intellect devourer. It never really had a chance, not when its whole effectiveness was tied up with those D&D psionic rules that almost nobody used. And without its Psychic Crush, followed up by an Ego Whip and a devastating Oedipus Complex Cathexis Suplex, it was just a big sponge with cougar legs.

What about the carrion crawler? Right, that's a more beloved monster. Very nice to spring on first level parties, because it doesn't actually hurt you. It doesn't bite, or rend, or maim. It just paralyzes you with a ridiculous number of tentacle attacks, and then one of your friends grabs you and pulls you away and you run from the slow-moving beastie and camp for a while. Or the ogre, who's waiting five paces behind it, grabs you and dismantles you like a Cornish hen. So basically, it's like the shrieker - a force multiplier for scarier things.

And then, the two half-a-monsters got together in the Fiend Folio and had one badass little baby. The grell.

See, if you're not going to use your brain, you might as well fill it up the ol' ventricles with buoyant gases, so you can float around - because a brain on the ceiling is a lot more scary than one on the floor. Oh yeah, also, tentacles that paralyze - long ones, too, that can grab you - and take you up to the beak to close the deal.



I think, therefore I maim.

 The result is one of the most iconic bad-acid-trip D&D monsters of all time - the one who would give the owlbear and mind flayer serious competition for space on the side of a van, dude, and would make a much more wicked bong. Plus: the grell, unlike the 'crawler, is Open Game Content. And oh yeah ... if you fast forward to 2nd and later editions you have Grell Philosophers. How sick is that?

Once again - sometimes the Fiend Folio is better.

Rot Grubs vs. Sons of Kyuss

Part 2 of an ongoing series ... Sometimes the Fiend Folio is better.

How would you rather be insta-killed?

By a white maggot that hops on you as you search a centuries-old mound of poop for treasure, burrows through you, and eats your heart?

Or by a bright green worm that hops on you from a worm farm that is in the skull of a shambling living corpse with which you are locked in deadly melee ... a corpse, spawned by a horrific demigod, that regenerates, causes fear, and as if all that plus the worms were not enough, infects you with leprosy at its very touch ... but back to the worm ... the worm that hops on you, burrows through you, and eats your brain, turning you instantly into another Son of Kyuss?

Oh, and here's the clincher: as you shamble around the dungeon, your skull squirming with worms, you feel like a million bucks, because the second most influential hard rock band of the 90's was named after you.

Gas Spores vs. Gorbels

1. A trick monster that depends on players being both hip and naive - knowing about beholders, being dumb enough to run up to melee range with one and take a swing on it, but not having cracked the Monster Manual to know that if it's not firing eye rays at you, you had better stand at 100' and deal with it via arrows...

2. A trick monster that AAA THE CLAWS ARE IN MY BACK I DON'T CARE IF IT EXPLODES GET IT OFF.

Sorry folks. Sometimes the Fiend Folio is better.

I apologize for this short fun break, and soon enough will return to the grind of theory and design.